CRAZY Avengers: Endgame Theory Destroys Any Hopes of Time Travel
For the longest time now, fans of Endgame have be juggling around the idea of time travel being one of the major plot points, and for good reason. Almost every shred of evidence that we have points to it. Ant-Man and the Wasp introduced time vortexes as being a thing. Samuel L. Jackson stated that Captain Marvel has the ability to time travel, and Doctor Strange even used the Time Stone to see every possible outcome with the fight with Thanos to find the answer as to how to beat him. Everything has seemed to add up to time travel. But there’s a theory going around that time travel will have. No major significance on the movie’s plot after all.
Ant-Man’s Time Travel
In the original Ant-Man film, Scott had to shrink between the molecules in order to defeat Yellow Jacket. In the process, he shrunk himself into the Quantum Realm. He used his blue gym particle disk to return himself to his normal size but when Hank asked him about the experience he told Hank that he didn’t remember. Scott has ended up in this same situation at the end fo the Ant-Man and the Wasp end-credits scene.
I was assumed that because Hank, Jan, and Hope were dusted, Scott was stranded in the Quantum Realm with no other way to return to the world other than to use the time vortexes. But we’ve seen from the original Ant-Man that Scott can return from the Quantum is he just placed a blue Pym Particle disk into his reactor. By doing so, he’ll just grow back to his original size in the van. The time vortexes are a form of misdirection in this case. Scott can still return, he just needs to remember how he did the first time. Once he does he can drive the van up to the Avengers Headquarters and learn about why everyone has sudden become a pile of dust.
Captain Marvel’s Time Travel
Samuel L. Jackson had an interview back in January where he mentioned that Captain Marvel had the rather miraculous ability to time travel. As you probably know by now, this isn’t normal. Captain Marvel has never had the ability to time travel in any adaption that she’s been in before. This has lead people to believe that maybe Captain Marvel doesn’t have the ability to time travel after all. What Sam said in the interview was more or less a mistake on his part, or another form of, you guessed it, misdirection, just something to get fans off the trail of what might actually be going down in both the Captain Marvel movie and Endgame.
This wouldn’t be the first time the Russo Brothers have trolled the fans away from the truth in this manner. When just guessing the title of Avengers 4 was a chore in itself, the Russo’s claimed that the title was nothing that any character had ever said before on screen. This turned out to not be true because the title of the movie is “Endgame,” something that has been said by both Doctor Strange and Tony Stark in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Age of Ultron respectively. So it’s not like they're above this particular tactic or like they wouldn’t do it again.
No Time Travel
So since the two main sources of time travel have been axed from the picture, the question becomes: “how exactly will the Avengers defeat Thanos and reverse the effects of the snap?” Well, the theory looks at the character Shuri for its answer. In Avengers: Infinity War, Shuri was volunteered to try and remove the mind stone from Vision’s head without, well, killing him. Being the genius that she is, she almost pulled it off, but was stopped at the last second by Corvus Glaive. The thing to take away from this moment is what exactly Shuri was doing while handling Vision’s procedure.
Shuri was analyzing the Mind Stone while trying to remove it from the Vision. She would have to know what she was dealing with in order to even preform the feat, so it would make sense that she essentially has a quote-on-quote blueprint of the Mind Stone on her computer. You can probably tell where we’re going with this. If Shuri has the Mind Stone in her database, then there’s a chance that she can create a clone of it. She can create clone Infinity Stones. The comics have done this before, although in their case it was Tony who pulled it off. Considering Shuri is apparently smarter than both Tony and Banner in the MCU, however, it would make the most sense for her to be the one to pull it off here. Besides, Tony’s lost in deep space somewhere trying not to suffocate.
Creating the Mind Stone doesn’t necessarily mean that Shuri thus has to ability to create all of the different stones right off of the bat, but she has the foundation for doing so. She would probably just need the essence of the others to pull off creating clone version of each of them. For instance, to create the Time Stone, she could use the Quantum Realm’s time vortexes, and just apply them to the foundation she came up with while analyzing the Mind Stone. Once Ant-Man is introduced to Shuri, he can reveal the Quantum Realm to her and help her tap into the time vortexes. Shuri can harness them to create a pseudo Time Stone and that would validate why they were introduced in Ant-Man and the Wasp.
Captain Marvel is a cosmic hero who could probably help with the creation of the Space Stone, especially if there are traces of Binary left within her. Binary can tap into the forces of a white hole, which is probably the closest Shuri will be able to get to the cosmos while on Earth. If Captain Marvel is incapable of helping out, then Wong may be able to help out instead (pending Thanos didn’t end up deleting him to). The sling ring spell that sorcerers like himself use, grant him the ability to travel anywhere in the universe and beyond. The ability might arguably be better than the Space Stone in the hands of a master.
Wong may also have the ability to help create the Reality Stone with his magic. While Wong is no Ancient One, he does have access to the Mirror Dimension, where sorcerers can bend matter to their will. If Shuri can harness his abilities she may be able to apply this concept to create a makeshift Reality Stone.
Next, the Hulk may be able to help with the Power Stone, considering his own power is technically limitless. Granted, there’s been no actual power scale applied to Hulk in the MCU yet. He’s never really met anyone that’s pushed him past his base. There’s Thanos, of course, but we all know how that turned out. Hulk and Bruce have no balance with one another, and Hulk is currently done being Bruce’s attack dog. So we currently have no idea how powerful he actually he is. There’s portably no way he’ll match his comic book variation because no other character currently has, but he should still be powerful enough to help create a phony power stone.
The Soul Stone would be the trickiest one to clone. Shuri could have possibly used the Heart-Shaped Herb that grants T’Challa his abilities for this task, but Killmonger burned all of the plant. But in the comics, Killmonger was also capable of creating a synthetic version of the herb. If he can pull it off, why can’t Shuri? Before granting a worthy candidate the abilities of the Black Panther, the herb allowed them to see in the Ancestral Plain. This is the closest you can probably get to a makeshift Soul World.
A general plot point for Endgame would then become finding the different sources necessary to create the stones. Once they have them, they would just create a fake gauntlet. We know that’s possible because a fake Infinity Gauntlet is presence in both Thor and Thor: Ragnarok. Now because the stones would be clones, and the gauntlet itself would be fake, this Infinity Gauntlet would be nowhere near on par with he original model and the original stones. That wouldn’t be point. The point would just be to give the Avengers something that they could use to combat Thanos and obtain the real gauntlet from him. Considering the real gauntlet was severely damaged when Thanos used it to wipe out half of the universe, it and the fake gauntlet could be considered equal in strength. Considering the Avengers have the numbers on their side, this would give them the definitive edge.
Shuri may even already be working on recreating the Mind stone. In the Avengers: Endgame trailer there was segment where Bruce was looking over the profiles of everyone the Avengers had ties too. The profile’s indicated who the Avengers could account for after the effects of the snap. A picture of Peter Parker passes, and right after him shows a shot of Shuri. Now , we know what happened to Peter Parker because we saw the snap kill him in Infinity War. But Shuri is different. She’s missing but we don’t know what happened to her or where she is currently. The last we saw of her Corvus Glaive had knocked her over in order to get to Vision. We don’t know what became of her after Infinity War.
Shuri isn’t a red shirt character. She’s had major roles in both Black Panther’s plot and Infinity War’s plot—not to mention that she’s T’challa’s, the king of Wakanda’s, sister. You can almost consider her the Bucky to T’challa’s Cap or the War Machine to T’challa’s Iron Man. If she was taken by the snap that definitely would have warranted a death scene, especially since even a character like Mantis received a death scene — of course, she was on a secluded planet standing next to every other major guardian and Iron Man and Nebula. This isn’t to say that Mantis isn’t an important character, just that if she got a death scene it wouldn’t make any sense for someone like Shuri to not get one too.
If Shuri were killed off by Corvus Glaive, that would also warrant some kind of death scene. We didn’t get that. Plus, she wouldn’t be considered “missing,” the Avengers wouldn’t have been able to find her body in her lab. Basically, in some way shape or form, Shuri is alive. This theory presents the idea that after Shuri was attacked — unable to find any allies and fearing wether or not enemy reinforcements would arrive, Shuri locked herself in some remote part of her lab and began work on her back up plan of recreating the Mind Stone. She probably also went to work on a way to recreate Vision, having possibly backed him up on the computer as well.
When the time comes for it, she’ll reveal herself to the Avengers with news of what she has. This is a weakness in the theory, though. There would be no reason for Shuri to have some hidden bunker that she can reliably work in that’s both out of sight of any invaders and still has possible connections to the outside world and not use it for her procedure on Vision. It would be simply nonsensical. So, the general idea is that this bunker that she’s using isn’t as advance as her overall lab, which would make sense, it’s just a backup bunker. But because it’s still a Wakandan bunker it’s still probably more reliable than most laboratories found around the world.
So basically, instead of focusing on time travel, Endgame will tackle two different objectives. Creating the fake Infinity Stones, and then tracking down Thanos. Once they get the Infinity Gauntlet from him, they can try and have Etri repair it so they can reverse the effects of the snap, or use it in its damaged state to fix the snap and destroy the gauntlet fully with one action.
